Speakers
Our all-star lineup of industry experts will share their vision for future and offer practical tips for getting things done.
Leslie Bradshaw
Leslie is the Chief Operating Officer at Guide, a software company focused on turning online news, social streams and blogs into video. She has been named one of the top female executives in the technology industry by Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, Jane Dough, Inc. Magazine and Mashable. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Chicago, Leslie also is a regular contributor at Forbes on the topic of female entrepreneurship.
Mark Frauenfelder
Mark is the former editor-in-chief of Wired Online, and was an editor at Wired magazine and Wired Books from 1993-1998. He was Playboy magazine's technology columnist for three years. He has appeared on The Colbert Report (twice) and the Martha Stewart Show, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Business Week, The Hollywood Reporter, Wired, and other national publications.
Ethan Nicolle
Ethan is from Coos Bay, Oregon. With no formal training in art, he first self published his own comics in high school. After working on obscure comic books like Creep and Puppet Terrors, and his own debut graphic novel the Weevil, Nicolle's humor series Chumble Spuzz was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Humor Publication in 2009. He currently has an animated series in production and creates the acclaimed web comic Axe Cop with his 7 year old brother Malachai Nicolle.
Malachai Nicolle
Malachai is an 8-year-old from central Washington. He started creating Axe Cop with his much older brother Ethan when he was only 5. Malachai loves video games, cartoons and secret attacks. He hopes to grow up and become a chemist that can create chemicals that give people the ability to instantly learn karate, or become a wizard soldier.
Kerry Bodine
Kerry is a vice president and principal analyst in Forrester's customer experience research practice and the coauthor of Forrester's latest book, Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.
Carolyn Chandler
Carolyn leads the User Experience practice for Manifest Digital, an interactive marketing and design firm based in Chicago's west loop. Carolyn has worked in the field of User Experience since 1996, alternating between software development and Web site design, each of which bring their own interesting challenges. Areas of focus include usability engineering, information architecture, and interaction design.
Carla Diana
Carla enjoys living as close to the near future as possible. In her studio she works on future-specting projects in areas such as domestic robots, mobile devices and sentient kitchen appliances, combining experience in industrial and interaction design to create solutions that bridge the gap between the physical and the digital.
Jason Kunesh
Jason wishes he had a great title like "gypsy beekeeper" or "wordologist" but has most recently performed as Director of User Experience & Product at Obama for America. You can often find him at the intersection of people and technology, advocating for elegant, simple solutions to gnarly problems. He's at his best when helping people work together using sketches on whiteboards and real-life prototypes to communicate ideas.
Dave Shea
Dave is the creator and cultivator of the highly influential website csszengarden.com, and co-author of The Zen of CSS Design (New Riders, 2005) with Molly Holzschlag. He speaks internationally at conferences and workshops and was an organizer of the North American arm of a popular international conference series, Web Directions.
Mark Trammell
Mark Trammell designs things and studies how people use them—most recently as senior design researcher at Twitter. His work on the Web spans 16 years including coauthoring two books on Web standards and tenures with Digg, PayPal, the Web Standards Project Educational Task Force, the University of Florida, and the United States Navy. Trammell's work at Twitter focused on how people learn Twitter, #NewTwitter, photos, and search.
Carla Axtman
Carla Axtman is a Digital Media Strategist & Online Communications Consultant, working with clients to develop their presence and voice online. Carla strategizes, creates and implements comprehensive online strategies for progressive campaigns, public affairs and non-profit clients. She was part of the successful team that elected Jeff Merkley to the US Senate in 2008.
Adam Arthur Bier
Adam is the founder of Bier Legal, P.C., a San Francisco-based boutique corporate law firm serving technology and design clients on both coasts and in Spain, France, Germany, and Israel. He represents numerous startups, including Cozy, Open Air Publishing, and Ipsy, as well as early employees and investors of prominent Silicon Valley companies.
Nick Blanchard-Wright
Nick Blanchard-Wright is Lead Software Developer at Temboo, where he helps make it delightfully easy to use and combine 100+ APIs from all over the web. With a background in biology, as well as over a decade in web app development, he is particularly interested in how APIs can unlock the potential of existing data sets, especially in science and government.
John Bragg
John is the CTO and Co-founder of Cozy. Before Cozy, he co-founded Seabright Studios, a San Francisco-based user experience firm. He started his career as a network security engineer at Capital One (before the caveman television adverts). After fighting the bad guys for years, he focused his energy on design simplicity and fast, elegant code.
Chrissie Brodigan
Chrissie leads user experience research for GitHub. As a UX designer, her work at Mozilla on Firefox websites and various startups has largely solved for growth and new user experiences. She loves learning how people learn and teaches design classes for General Assembly. Chrissie wrote a dissertation on the history of airline stewardesses, ask her about that!
Charlie Brown
Charlie founded Context Partners and brings a passion for the power of collective problem-solving and international expertise in launching new ideas, developing community-focused business models, and driving executive-level organizational strategy.
Richard Bruning
Richard Bruning is currently a freelance writer, graphic designer and artist. In the late 80s, he was DC Comics’ Design Director, working on such landmark books as WATCHMEN and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. In recent years he served as Creative Director and was responsible for DC’s web presence and its first online original comics imprint, Zuda.
David Chelsea
David grew up in Portland, and later moved to New York City for a spell. His comics and illustration have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the New York Observer, and Portland Monthly. He is the author of the graphic novels David Chelsea In Love and Welcome To The Zone and the how-to book Perspective! For Comic Book Artists and its sequel Extreme Perspective!
Kari Chisholm
Kari is a Democratic political consultant whose commentary on the Heisman Trophy is regularly sought in sports coverage, and his site StiffArmTrophy.com has correctly predicted the winner of the trophy every year from 2002 to 2012. He is the founder and publisher of BlueOregon, the state's most widely read political blog. He was the longest-running weekly guest on the Portland talk radio station KPOJ.
Jeff Cohen
Jeff Cohen is currently the Chief Instructor of Code Academy here in Chicago, and teaches the beginner-focused Web Development course. He has worked with object-oriented programming languages and application frameworks for more than 15 years. In 2008, Jeff started Purple Workshops, conducting beginner-level workshops in Ruby, Rails, and agile software techniques.
Adam Connor
As an Experience Design Director with Mad*Pow in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Adam combines his interaction design experience with his background in Computer Science, Film and Visual Design to create effective, efficient, and easy-to-use applications, websites, and interactive media.
Scott Cowley
Scott is a digital marketing researcher and competitive marketing strategy instructor at Arizona State University. He was previously Head of Search Engine Optimization at tech accessory maker ZAGG.
Jason Cranford Teague
Jason is a long standing leader in the Web design community, well know for being able to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences. His most recent book is CSS3 Visual Quickstart Guide available in finer book stores everywhere.
Josh Daniel
Josh is a content inventor and content strategist. He comes up with ideas and strategies to bring content alive and meet your goals. He produces his own original ideas—and brings yours to life. Josh has frequently worked with educational and non-profit institutions and brings his understanding of political and social issues—as well as a love of learning, teaching, kids, and parenting to the mix.
Bill DeRouchey
Bill DeRouchey is a principal designer for GE, tackling massive design problems involving business processes, design systems, and analytics, currently focusing on jet engine performance and service. He's been shaping, framing and distilling information for over 20 years, as creative director, product manager, interaction designer, interaction architect and writer.
Joseph Dickerson
Joseph is a User Experience Architect focused on designing effective and innovative on-line and mobile applications. With over a decade of experience in software design and user research, Dickerson has made it his mission to make technology easier for people to use.
Derek Featherstone
Derek Featherstone is an internationally-known speaker and authority on accessibility and web development. He is the lead of Simply Accessible Inc., a leading firm that delivers insightful and creative accessibility consulting to Fortune 500 corporations, educational institutions, public utilities, government agencies and other private
sector clients.
Steve Fisher
Steve is the content nerd-herder and responsive design fanatic at The Republic of Quality, in Vancouver, Canada. He leads the charge on the creative end of our projects, coordinating research, strategy, visual and interaction design, and content strategy. On the global stage he's a sought-after speaker on topics like responsive web design, UX, open source, design thinking, and web process. He also loves Twitter (maybe a little too much) and is at @hellofisher.
Debra Gelman
Debra Gelman is a researcher, designer and strategist in the field of interactive children’s media. She has worked with PBS Sprout, Scholastic, Crayola, Pepperidge Farm, Campbell’s Soup, Georgia Public Television and other companies to create sites, mobile apps and virtual worlds for kids.
Lakecia Gunter
Lakecia is the Technical Assistant for Justin Rattner, Corporate Vice President of Intel Labs and Chief Technology Officer of Intel Corporation. She was named a 2009 Modern-Day Technology Leader by US Black Engineer and Information Technology magazine, and honored at the 23rd Black Engineer of the Year Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Global Competitiveness Conference.
Mamoon Hamid
Mamoon is a General Partner at The Social+Capital Partnership, an early stage Venture Capital firm based in Palo Alto. Mamoon has invested in and served on the boards of some of the most disruptive software companies of recent times including Box, Yammer (acquired by Microsoft), Castlight Health, Act-On Software, Cloudon and Wave.
Andrew Hinton
Andrew Hinton is an Information Architect at The Understanding Group (aka TUG). Since the early 90s, he's been helping clients and employers of all shapes and sizes make better information environments. A co-founder and past board member of the IA Institute, Andrew is currently working on a book for O'Reilly on how information shapes our experience of context.
Shay Howe
As a designer and user interface engineer, Shay Howe has a passion for solving problems while building creative and intuitive products, and he specializes in user interface design and development. Additionally, Shay teaches a front-end design and development class at Starter League and helps co-organize Refresh Chicago and UX Happy Hour.
Kevin Hoyt
Kevin Hoyt is a Group Manager of Developer Evangelism at Adobe, Inc. where he has been actively involved in furthering web technologies for more than a decade. As a Developer Evangelist, Kevin is responsible for covering a broad array of Adobe technologies, and spends upwards of seventy percent of the year presenting keynotes, session and hands-on labs at events across the globe.
Emily Inlow-Hood
Emily Inlow-Hood is passionate about inspiring people to engage in social good. She is the social media lead at PATH, an international nonprofit organization that transforms global health through innovation, where she helped build their social media presence from the ground up.
Aaron Irizarry
Aaron is a Product Designer at Nasdaq OMX. He has a background in visual design and has been handcrafting pixels since 1998. Over time Aaron grew increasingly interested in the overall experiences that users were having with the sites and applications that he was working on. He now focuses on creating well-rounded experiences and trying to save the world one user at a time.
Jim Kidwell
As a writer, speaker and general software nerd, Jim Kidwell evangelizes the effective integration of fonts in creative workflows. Focusing on how effective font and digital asset management can affect all levels of an organization - from the legal, creative and branding standpoints - Jim has shared his unique perspective with audiences at SXSW, Future of Web Design and more.
Jason Lankow
An expert in the field of data visualization, Jason lectures frequently on the subject of infographics and helped create and teach the Columbia University course “Visualization of Information,” offered as part of the school’s M.S. program in Information and Knowledge Strategy.
Jensine Larsen
An unstoppable, award-winning social media entrepreneur, speaker and visionary, Jensine is the founder of World Pulse, an action media network devoted to bringing women a global voice. Today, using the power of interactive digital media, World Pulse connects over 50,000 women from 190 nations - including those from villages using internet cafes and cell phones - into a powerful force for change.
Lee LeFever
Lee is the Founder and Chief Explainer of Common Craft and author of The Art of Explanation - Making Your Ideas, Products and Services Easier to Understand. Since 2007, the company has won numerous awards, created explanations for the world's most respected brands and earned over 50 million online video views.
Mel Lim
Mel cares to design a better world. She knows that begins with the individual and a commitment to hold fast to one’s dreams, no matter the odds. This award-winning, Malaysian-born design leader began her career at age 13 when she drafted architectural plans using her sets of Rotring Rapidograph pens in her mother’s interior design shop in Penang.
Ivo Lukas
Ivo is the Chief Innovation Officer & Executive Director of Global Mentorship and Partnership Program at Girls in Tech. She is passionate about leading, nurturing and mentoring the next generation, especially young girls, whose aspire to be in technology. She is the advocate of encouraging positive, inspiring and improving lives of the young girls to gain an entrepreneurial spirit and leadership skills.
David McFarland
David is president of Sawyer McFarland Media, Inc., a Web development and training company in Portland, Oregon. He's been building websites since 1995, when he designed an online magazine for communication professionals. He's served as webmaster at the University of California at Berkeley and the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center, and oversaw a complete CSS-driven redesign of Macworld.com.
Chris Mills
Chris is a web technologist, open standards evangelist and education agitator, currently working at Opera Software in the developer relations team. He writes about web standards for dev.opera.com and other publications (such as .net mag and A List Apart), gives talks at universities and industry conferences worldwide, and lobbies universities to improve their web education courses.
Jewel Mlnarik
Jewel is a project choreographer at Temboo and a community developer who plays at the intersection of art and technology. She's spent the past 18 years becoming a digital generalist and growing businesses, having worn hats such as designer, developer, architect, business systems analyst, user personal experience evangelist and strategist.
Mitzi Montoya
As a girl, Mitzi asked her parents if she could get a car when she turned sixteen. They agreed, with a caveat: Mitzi would have to work for it and build it herself – a tradition she’s continued with her 2 boys. At sixteen, with a 1964 Mustang Fastback complete, Mitzi launched into a lifelong pursuit of making.
Andrew Mottaz
Andrew Mottaz is the Founder of ProtoShare, the online mockup and wireframing tool. He has been building great user experiences since 1999. For the last 5 years, he has been focusing on helping development teams integrate UX processes.
Rachel Nabors
Rachel was raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she learned goose wrangling and Photoshop. After watching Chasing Amy at the tender age of 14, she started making comics which helped her escape rural poverty and eventually lead to a career in web development. Now she lives with her husband in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is training to become stronger by mastering Ruby and JavaScript.
Torie Nguyen
Torie Nguyen is the co-founder of Crafty Wonderland: Portland's art + craft extravaganza. Crafty Wonderland produces a large scale craft fair twice a year at the Oregon Convention Center and also has a retail store in downtown Portland featuring the work of over 175 local artists and crafters. Torie also has her own line of handcrafted jewelry called Totinette.
Brad Nunnally
Brad is a user experience designer and researcher located in St. Louis, MO. Over the course of his career he has helped clients in the financial, health care management, public utilities, and pharmaceutical management industries. He’s provided them with deep insight into their customers and users needs, and designed engaging experiences that were catered directly for those needs.
Nam-ho Park
Nam-ho leads the implementation of creative web strategy, online community and mobile solutions at Forum One, working with non-profit, governmental and issue-driven organizations to increase their impact. Nam-ho has been active in web technologies and crafting user experience for over 12 years working in the US and Korea, and is a founding member of TEDxSeoul and MobileUXCamp Seattle.
Thomas Phinney
Thomas Phinney is Guru of Fonts & Typography, including the 5000-strong web font library for WebINK, at Extensis. From 1997-2008 he worked in type at Adobe, lastly as product manager for fonts and global typography.
Scé Pike
Scé Pike has been defining user experience strategies for Fortune 500 companies for more than 15 years. As Chief Experience Officer at Citizen, she drives the user experience vision for all Citizen customers, including AT&T, Intel, HTC, NBC, T-Mobile, Samsung and Disney/ABC.
Melody Quintana
Melody is a content strategist at Facebook. She uses language to shape products for over a billion people, including Facebook Photos, Camera, and the new Poke app.
Kevin Rose
Kevin is a General Partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on early-stage and seed investments. He has deep roots as a founder and serial entrepreneur, and brings this experience to advise Google Ventures' portfolio companies.
Anoop Sahgal
Anoop Sahgal has global experience in leadership roles that span product marketing, product management, and business development in high technology. In his current role within Industry Strategy and Marketing at Adobe, he works with technology executives to help grow their businesses through best in class digital marketing strategies.
Bill Scott
Bill has always enjoyed technology (25 years). And he has always enjoyed interacting with people (even longer). It was a natural to blend the two loves together.
David Smith
Study in contrasts, Renaissance man, a doer who will not be denied. Both a technologist and a writer by training, his sense for how to engage while informing has consistently put David in marketing leadership roles. Innovation and commitment to results set McBru’s tone: whether spearheading industry-first awareness campaigns, crafting heroic headlines, or devising lead-nurturing programs, David solves creative challenges without the burden of “that can’t be done.”
Jonathan Snook
Jonathan is an internationally-admired web designer and developer, and a gifted creator of striking designs and impeccable markup and code. He moves effortlessly from client-side, front-end work to hardcore server-side challenges, and his fluency in CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL make him the “turn-to” man for many high-profile clients.
Rafa Soto
Copywriter. Design junkie. Multitasker. Dreamer. Optimistic despite of everything. I'd love to become a vegetarian but I live in Barcelona and there's (delicious) jamón serrano all around. I love dogs but I'm far too irresponsible to take care of one. That's why I only have a digital agency instead.
Jacob Surber
Jacob is a Senior Product Manager at Adobe, helping make the web a more beautiful place. A designer / developer, now trapped in a Product Manager’s body, is working on Adobe’s next generation web design tools. This self-professed tools nerd now uses web standards to create tomorrows tools.
Dave Thomsen
Dave brings nearly 15-years of experience in product design, digital media and new product innovation. While at IDEO, he taught courses in design methodology, visual thinking and prototyping in Stanford University's Design Division.
Jason Ulaszek
Jason is a crazed evangelist for user experience design - accosting strangers with sermons on its value in solving business and social problems. He's a leader in the experience design practice at Manifest Digital, serves as an adjunct faculty member in the HCI Masters program at DePaul University and is Co-founder of UX for Good.
Russ Unger
Russ Unger is a Senior UX Leader for GE Capital where he leads design and research projects and teams. He is co-author of the book “A Project Guide to UX Design” and is co-author of “Designing the Conversation” and he is also working on a book on guerrilla design and research methods due out well, sometime.
Janell Watt
Janell is the Volunteer Development Manager for the Habitat for Humanity ReStores in Portland. She is dedicated to enriching the culture of volunteerism in her organization, and in her community. You may find her delivering donuts to volunteers...in a full panda suit.
Thomas Wester
Thomas leads Second Story Labs, an incubator for new ideas and projects that explore the innovative use of technology to create cutting-edge interactive experiences.
Gino Zahnd
Gino is the CEO and Co-founder of Cozy. Before Cozy, he was a founder and CEO of Seabright Studios in San Francisco. He's been a UX practitioner and leader in core teams at Flickr, Splunk, Kosmix, Adaptive Path, and Studio Archetype. He loves creating products that solve real problems.
Cathy Zwicker
Cathy Zwicker is a mom, artist + seamstress that lives and works in SE Portland. Under the name Bossa Nova Baby, she creates one of a kind clothing and accessories using screen printing and both machine and hand embroidery.
